I wrote this in 2015 after visiting a TPRS classroom in Denver Public Schools:
It’s been 24 hours since I left Julie’s classroom and during that time I have, even in sleep, been besieged by the word ruido and a bunch of other Spanish words. The din is happening. It happens in the target country but also when the teaching in a classroom is excellent and super repetitive. That word ruido won’t leave me alone. I’m not even certain what it means but I think it means noise but the big point to make on the din is that it doesn’t matter.
Ruido is now being churned and and bubbles up. Is it acquired? For a test? Because a test is now necessary to find out if I know it. Right? Gotta test it, right? Gotta test it.
No. When I get more reps I will know what it means for sure in my conscious mind. But not yet. That’s how it works. So don’t give me a summative or even a formative test on that word and a bunch of others unless you want to imitate all those teachers from the last century who don’t get it and kill motivation by asking unfairly for translations of words.
All that under-the-radar chatter in my deeper mind doesn’t make sense to my conscious mind but makes a lot of sense to me in terms of what I know about Krashen as my deeper mind continues to sort through the sounds I heard and masterfully begins to build a new language system, make sense out of all the noise I heard while listening to Julie teach Spanish. The bees are a’working in the hive of my unconscious mind!
That’s the mark of good comprehensible input teaching – you get the din going on. I woke up many times in sleep and found myself making up little nonsensical sentences in Spanish. I had fun creating them, and didn’t care what they meant. I have to wait for enough input and then when I’ve had enough instruction like I got yesterday it will start to output. I don’t get to say when the bee hive is finished. When I start speaking Spanish naturally – that is when I know the bee hive is finished.